‘How long have you been waiting to do that?’ Mela asked with a laugh as she broke away from him.
Astrin raised a hand to his mouth, unwilling to accept the reality of the moment. It had to be a dream, this moment only ever happened in his dreams. Things like this did not happen in real life.
Ladies of standing did not fall in love with their help, they didn’t come into the noise of the city and go on an adventure like in a children’s book. They didn’t stand up to their fathers and cut themselves off from their money.
‘Astrin?’ Mela said after a moment. ‘You poor boy, shall I do it again to wake you up?’
‘Longer than I wish to admit,’ he said, ‘is how long I’ve been wishing to kiss you, my lady.’
‘Unless you want to compare me to the sad lady or the cold lady, call me Mela, as you’ve always done.’
A hot spike drove itself into his side. He felt his damned fur singe and wither. The pain was bright – it hurt so badly that spots swam in his vision. He fought against them, fought to go back into the darkness to escape it.
‘Were I a lesser man,’ a gravelly human voice said, ‘I’d quote scripture at you. I’d claim that you were an abomination unto god and thus, something to destroy.’
Something hard hit him in the face, and for once, he was glad that the transformation had left his skin dulled of most of its feeling.
‘I wish your only crime were that you were an abomination unto god. Personally, I don’t care if he likes you or not, if he exists. No god cares enough to watch this world closely, to protect that which breach her borders. No, you are an abomination unto man, which is worse.’
I am a man. He wanted to say. Somewhere, under this form, I’m probably a better man than you are. He spat blood onto the dark floor. At least I was.
‘You’re like a rat, and you know what we do with rats?’
He was hit across the face again. Evidently the answer was “hit them with lead pipes”.
‘Destroy me already,’ he muttered, feeling blood and chips of teeth in his mouth. He spat, and took a deep breath. ‘If that is your intent.’
The man sniggered. ‘That’s usually what you do with rats. However…if there’s a cat to feed them to…’ Someone yanked on the wires and tubes in his veins. ‘Then you don’t destroy them, you use them.’
A cruel laugh, then harsh light flooded into the room. He blinked, and hurried his eyes to adjust, then wished he hadn’t. The floor of his room was covered in blood – it hadn’t even been washed, the older, dry blood simply flaked off and blew away.
There was an open doorway directly across from him – inside was young woman that looked human enough, being beaten with lengths of metal similar to the one in his captor’s hands.
Panic rose – he’d become a love-sick pup, the mere sight or sound a woman made him think of Mela – but fell, her skin, even covered in blood was the wrong colour. The assaulters noticed the audience, and closed the door. Muffled screams still filtered through, and he prayed, just for a moment, that Mela was dead, and not trapped in a place like this.
‘The only way out is if you call on that bastard Death, then again, that would assume he has pity on creatures like you.’
The human shut the door, and he was glad of the darkness.